Android is not Motorola. If Motorola is losing money it doesn'tfollow that Android is.

Motorola's losses show other players in the market either that being an Android OEM is unprofitable even if it's Google itself, or that Google is willing to sustain losses to better compete with other Android OEMs. Neither interpretation bodes well for other manufacturers using Android.

Android is popular because any manufacturer can make a fully functional phone for very little development cost. Free is a strength, not a weakness. Microsoft has a closed proprietary phone and it isn't doing well at all.

As an upside to keeping their cards close to their vest, they have easily rolled out a "fuck your OEM/carrier, here's a dev preview directly from us if you're not afraid of voiding your warranty", and it's not reported to be causing many problems to people trying it.

Google cannot push an update for the above-hardware parts of Android and expect everything to work, because the device vendors have been tweaking those as well. So the tinkerers have to use third-party mods like Cyanogen, or stick with a Nexus.

It is a win-win proposition for everyone and that is why it does so well.

In practice, it shifts control to the manufacturers, and the benefits for the vast majority of the end-users are not so clear cut.

Bus stops are ubiquitous around metropolitan Helsinki. They not only use the stops used by "main line" buses, but also stops on smaller residential roads that are served by minibus lines catering to seniors and other people with reduced mobility (a Kutsuplus vehicle is basically the same minibus equipped with high-tech gizmos). They have even invented new stops for themselves in places they notice people often go to.

With any luck, our government will also tax our gas to the point where paying $10 to wait for a bus in the rain and then ride in it with random strangers for an hour all over the town will make more sense than driving directly there in comfort of your own car in 15 minutes.

You don't need the government for that. Rising oil prices may do this sooner than we all switch to electric cars, natgas, or something else. Pretty much every datum in your rainy day scenario is sheer hyperbole as far as Helsinki capital area is concerned. Car commute is pretty fast, but if you need to park downtown, you'd need to spend extra time and money. Kutsuplus also drives you almost door to door, and you can come up to the pickup point at the prearranged time without waiting, or even track the bus in real time.

Random strangers are called the society. Here, the society is not that scary in general; most people would rather stare at their shoes than acknowledge your existence, unless you need help.

And who says innovation comes only from the private sector!

This project has been developed by a private company, and it aims to be profitable.

Such a service would be very useful in rural areas, indeed.For now, though, Kutsuplus is piloted within Kehä I, AKA the perimeter of civilization around Helsinki:-)

I tried the service shortly after it was opened to the public. It's awesome. You can track your bus in a mobile browser in real time. On a screen inside the bus, you get ETA information for your destination (possibly after other passengers' stops if they get out earlier).

Damn it people, so much emotional attachment to a company because it once had the distinction to cock up an OSS-based project.

Please get it through your heads: Nokia shareholders' objectives do not include supporting the cause of Linux, or Qt, or whatever. It is, plainly, to make money. They are fucking happy to see something sellworthy made out of the dysfunctional wreck that Nokia was in 2010.

I'm a bit suspicious about that. Almost every smartphone upstart these days claims ability to run Android apps, and in the end it comes to very little.

Please realize it's not just Dalvik emulation that you need to do to make an Android application work. There is a whole lot of services and intent handlers that an app may rely upon, many of them digging into system internals, most of them are not under AOSP. These need to be implemented compatibly on an alien platform, basically from scratch. So, it's a major effort to undertake, in addition to your platform development. And there will inevitably be a long tail of apps that just don't work because you missed some little detail, or bug-for-bug compatibility.

Has anyone actually tried those myriad Android apps that were claimed to be ported to Blackberry OS 10?

(Sigh) Please read this. Keep close attention to the dates and how each device is named. I hope it will help to remove a lot of confusion from your postings. As someone who was in on the events described, I can attest that the article is mostly correct.

What myth? It's in numerous sources backed up by financials and information from Nokia itself.

Continuation of this discussion would require you to provide the sources.

Never mind the accolades Ahonen has received over the years, nor his lectures at Oxford, nor his authoritative books, nor his amazingly accurate record of predictions in the Mobile Phone industry, year after year, nor his personal network of staffers at almost every Mobile Phone company and provider in the world... nor how many times he made other supposed expert analysts look like fools (ZDnet, Howard Forums, etc. etc.)

Never mind that, because very little of it is actually true.For the record of his predictions, here's one.Sorry, but Tomi is really a tedious moron who passes himself off as an expert to gullible people.

Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.

And RIM were selling quite a lot of Blackberries until it was too late.

FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.

That's what the powerpoint said. In practice, there were... issues.

Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers.

Nokia had another issue: being the company that allowed the N97 to be released. That was in 2009, years after iPhone was on the market. All that happened after was, in essence, karmic justice.

In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market.

Your time window for "just about to be released" must stretch for half a year.And, I'm afraid, your description of a presentation has no basis in documented reality. It was known since February that Nokia is pivoting towards Windows Phone and everybody knew that the N9 was a dead end. Moreover, it wasn't ever meant to be a proper MeeGo device. It was fucked up by internal politics long before Elop came on stage.

Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios.

I'm sorry to see you believe in a myth with no credible evidence whatsoever.